


The buried bird sings with the wind

by AgapantoBlu



Series: Short-fics from Agap's Schrödinger Tumblr [7]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: AirBender!Jean, Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting, Jean's Fall and Rise, M/M, Non-Graphic Reference To Past Abuse, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 05:15:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17016438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgapantoBlu/pseuds/AgapantoBlu
Summary: Jean Moreau was an air-bender. Or, at least, that’s what he remembers from before Riko dragged him kicking and screaming underground, in a grave of solid stone and stale darkness, eleven years ago.





	The buried bird sings with the wind

**Author's Note:**

> This is so widespread in a few snippets, but I love it too much to let it disappear.

 

Jean Moreau was an air-bender. Or, at least, that’s what he remembers from before Riko dragged him kicking and screaming underground, in a grave of solid stone and stale darkness, eleven years ago.

 

 

 

For the first three months in Ba Sing Se with the Trojans, Jean flinches at every breath of wind that caresses his skin, terrified of the possibility of it being his doing, an unconscious pull like a child outstretching his hand to his mother’s gown when faced with something scary, and waiting for Riko’s shadow to appear, looming, ready to dish out punishment and pain.

 

Jeremy asks him, “So, you’re a non-bender, right?”

Jean says, “Yes,” and keeps awake all night waiting for his lie to be found out and dealt with.

 

 

“You could kill him,” Nathaniel spits. Not as in, the words; he literally spits on the floor, and Jean ignores the red swirling in the saliva. “You could literally just snap your fingers and pull the air out of his lungs and watch him choke.”

The words feel to him like a foreigner prayer, the power of which he could distantly recognize and perceive thrumming in the air, but that somehow doesn't fully reach him, lacks a single necessary trait for him to understand fully. Probably it is faith, since Jean lost his so many years ago.

He soaks a cloth in water and silently passes it over the crusted blood on Nathaniel’s chest, careful still not to touch the open cuts too harshly. “So could you,” he says, instead of answering. “You could blood bend him.”

“I’m not a blood-bender.“

“And I’m not an air-bender.“

“Bullcrap. You’re just scared.“

Jean blinks. “Of course I am.” 

He misses the freedom of flying and floating and filling his lungs to the brim, but he has the scars to speak for how feeble his few escapades have been. His bending now is not even technique, it’d be just the lucky shot of a toddler. He can’t remember any of his mother’s lessons anymore, but Riko trains with the best every day and can burn a fly to a crisp from a hundred feet distance. 

“The question is,-” he whispers, picking up needle and thread and wondering why he is bothering with Nathaniel when nobody has ever been there to suture his wounds for him, “-why are you not?”

 

 

Jean expected the Avatar to be… _more_. More involved, more passionate, more caring. Taller too. Andrew Minyard is none of that, not to mention the most bending Jean has ever seen him perform is lighting up his thumb with a flame barely big enough to lit up his cigarette. 

The bright side is watching Kevin slowly losing it over how disinterested in learning earth bending his dear Avatar is. After one particularly gruesome scolding, Minyard picked up some pebbles and arranged them, by hand, to draw dicks on the sand of the training ground. Kevin considered retirement, that day.

Nathaniel stands by the side of the ground, looking just as disinterested in teaching water bending as his pupil is in learning it. Kevin is still ranting as if he truly believes anybody is paying attention to him. 

Jeremy looks at them from the bleachers, eyes wide at the display. “They don’t look like they’re making much progress, uh?”

Only Jeremy could define such pathetic display as “ _not much progress_ ”. Jean scoffs, crosses his arms and refuses to answer.

Not that it is needed. Jeremy Knox is perfectly capable of holding a full three conversations at the same time all on his own. “Rumor has it Kevin contacted an air-bender, but was turned down. They haven’t started looking for a substitute yet; Kevin has been adamant in having this one.”

“Kevin will have to learn how to take no for an answer.“

The Gods know Jean isn’t going to change his.

 

 

When they come, Jean can feel the blood-stained smile of all his nightmares running on his skin. When he tries to take a step, somewhere, anywhere, he is sure Riko’s eyes are on him, searching and promising revenge.

He feels somehow detached by everything going on around him, the earth benders running around trying to reinforce their defenses before the assault, Neil and Kevin plotting by his side, the bells screaming and the people crying in fear. There’s a seagull flying above their heads, and he looks at that.

Neil pulls off the wall. “We can’t resist against this,” he says, cold hearted, and ignores Jeremy’s outcry. “Ba Sing Se will fall.”

The ground under their feet trembles and Kevin cusses. Smoke rises from the wall seventy steps to their left.

Jean looks to the Fire Nation army and thinks about home, about a temple high above and the grumbles of the flying bisons and the laughter of children. He thinks of ruins and quietness and the desperate weeping of a kid echoing down the lonely corridors and the cruel smile, Riko’s same smile, of Kengo Moriyama saying “ _he’ll make a fine pet_ “.

Jean is not a pet. And the Gods forbid he forgets it again.

Jeremy cusses and Kevin trembles, but Neil stares at him as Jean stares to the enemy. It’s been a long time since he’s allowed himself to think as his masters as such and when he does, he can feel it in his chest, swirling, slow at first but faster and stronger by the second.

It’s not something the monks taught him to do. It’s something Riko taught him with every line carved on his skin and every man sent to his bed and every drop of water into his throat. With every bruise on his skin, Riko showed him how to hate and now Jean lets it come out of his chest like the roar of a caged beast with broken chains.

It rises so high it touches the sky and growls so loud it covers the scream of the soldiers falling under its merciless touch.

“Jean,“ Kevin hisses. “Jean, that’s a hurricane. What the actual _fuck_ , Jean.”

“Ba Sing Se will fall,“ because it’s true. Because Ba Sing Se will need to fall to rise again, and because Riko will not rest until it’s burnt to the ground. Still, it doesn’t mean Jean can’t make it as difficult as he can. “But it will not fall today.“

He feels like a child of eight once again, cussing and spitting and scratching at his captor’s face. He already knows how the story will end, there’s no getting around it, but it fills him to the brim with pure joy to think of Riko watching the destruction to his army and knowwho is responsible for it.

Maybe, for a moment, he will even fear Jean’s wrath, before madness takes him over again.

 

 

The doors slam open with strength enough to send them hitting the wall. Riko storms in, burning, scorching, hot enough to make all his soldiers quiver and shrink away from his path.

Jean likes to think he grew strong enough in the past month that he wouldn’t flinch under his wrath, even if he were physically capable to do so. As it is, tied in heavy metal chains and bleeding from roughly every inch of his skin, he revels with making Riko come all the way in front of him and wait for Jean to lift his head and look back up.

Riko backhands him. Jean’s whole trunk turns under the hit. “Where are the others?!”

Jean thinks of black tunnels, dark passages and Jeremy’s bright tears.  _Come along, Jean!_

“I don’t know.“ It’s true. He stopped Neil from talking his plan as soon as he realized he could not go along with it.

_I will not walk underground again._

Neil had looked at him like he was crazy, because giving up on an escape route ‘ _just_ ’ because of trauma and abuse was just plain dumb to someone who spent their life on the run. Jean never expected him to understand.

“Of course you don’t, you worthless tool!” Riko snaps, fury so great he spits as he talks. “Why would they tell you? You’re just made to serve and entertain, you’re too dumb to think!”

Jean lets him ramble. He could have believed him, once, but not now. Now he thinks of Kevin trying to drag him in the darkness, cruel in his desperate attempt at saving him. Now he thinks of Andrew wishing him to die under the falling debris, for Riko won’t make this fast nor painless. 

Now, he thinks of Jeremy’s salted lips.  _“Please, don’t die.”_

Riko roars, burns tapestries off the walls and marks the floors in black. He hits Jean on the head, once then twice then thrice then countless times, with slaps and punches and the crop he has at his waist, and Jean lets him do it. The pain reaches the highest point and then, flickers down. Vanishes. 

It leaves behind just the bliss of void and quiet.

Jean goes meekly to the silence. He never promised Jeremy anything, after all.

 

 

Jean comes back to the smell of tea and the chirping of something very, very irritating.

“I’ll roast your damn bird,“ he tries to say, though it comes out more like a sluggish groan and brings him back just a teasing laughter.

“Welcome back to the land of living, my dear,“ Renee says, voice too familiar to be mistaken. Jean keeps his eyes closed, and relishes in the soft touch of her fingers on his forehead and cheeks. “How do you feel?“

Jean scoffs. He thinks that’s answer enough. Renee, indeed, laughs again.

“More tea, then,“ she says, as if tea is the solution to everything. For her, it probably is; but Jean guesses whoever is re-known as the most powerful fire-bender to ever exist doesn’t need much more than her own mind and whatever quirk she likes.

She serves him her bloody tea as he sighs and forces himself to sit up. He is in a room he can’t remember, but with traits familiar enough to make his head spin. “I thought you said this was the land of living.”

Renee doesn’t look up from her cup. “It is.”

“Then how can I be in a room in Ba Sing Se?“

Someone in the streets is selling cabbages loudly. Jean has a deja-vu of that too.

“Ba Sing Se fell after you did,“ Renee says, helping him get the cup to his lips despite the bandages and trembling of his hands. “But your resistance inspired its inhabitants. From the tunnels, they pillaged the Fire Nation soldiers, slowed the destroying works. When the Avatar stopped Riko, they reclaimed the city and started building it again.“ She hesitates, just for a second but enough for Jean to hear it. “They found you in a walled-up box of a room. Riko had given ordered to have you buried alive, but someone let a brick loose and fed you water and food in secrecy.“

It takes a while for everything to come back, but Jean remembers darkness and pain and fear and stuffed air. He remembers the square of light that opened at night, the moonlight that came in and how he brought his face as close as he could to soak on that spark of brightness, to breath fresh, to drink and eat from a pitchy black hand, calloused but caring, strong.

“Thea,“ he murmurs.

Renee nods. “Kevin vouched for her. We were waiting for you to wake up and be coherent before her trial. I’m sure it will be proven she worked against Riko the whole time.”

“Kevin,“ Jean says, testing the name. “Neil? An-Minyard?“

“Neil and Andrew are in the Fire Nation capital. There’s so much to do, now.“ Once again, she smiles to fill the room. “The war is over, Jean-“ A twinkle, mischievous, in her eyes, “-and Jeremy is headed here as we speak.“

_Jeremy_.

Jean doesn't give Renee the satisfaction of seeing him smile or cry or, even more embarrassing, blush. He just faints back again and vaguely considers not waking up again until Jeremy’s arrival.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I have both a Tumblr and a Twitter, now, both @agapantoblu.


End file.
